Mario Kart DS for Nintendo DS: Facts and Reception

Mario Kart DS is a kart racing game from Nintendo EAD, put on sale by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS in November 2005. Metacritic gives it a Metascore of 91, and it was the first Mario Kart that could be played online.

Overview

Nintendo presented the game as the fifth main entry in the Mario Kart series and the second on a handheld. Hideki Konno produced it. Nintendo announced a DS Mario Kart on 11 May 2004 and let the public try it at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, where the wireless features were shown too, according to Wikipedia.

The game runs at 60 frames per second with full 3D characters and tracks, which was a notable technical claim for the hardware at the time.

Konno said in an interview that older courses were included so that people who had raced in the Super Nintendo original would find familiar ground. He also said he wanted everyone, not only hardcore players, to go online, a remark he made while comparing the feature with online play in the Halo series.

How it plays

The player picks a Mario series character and races seven rivals around a track, collecting item boxes along the way. Some items slow other racers; others speed up the player’s own kart. The starting roster is the eight characters from Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart: Super Circuit, and Daisy, Dry Bones, Waluigi and R.O.B. can be unlocked, which makes twelve. Each one has three karts that differ in top speed, acceleration and handling.

There are five single-player modes: Grand Prix, Time Trial, Versus, Battle and Mission. Grand Prix and Versus offer 50cc, 100cc and 150cc engine classes, which work as difficulty levels, and a mirror mode with flipped tracks can be unlocked later. Thirty-two courses are split across eight cups. Half are new (the Nitro Grand Prix) and half return from earlier games (the Retro Grand Prix), among them Baby Park from Mario Kart: Double Dash.

Wireless play is the other half of the design. Eight players can race together over local wireless, and people without a cartridge can join through DS Download Play, where the host’s single card supplies a limited set of courses. Those guests appear as Shy Guy, a character that is not selectable in the regular game. Online races on the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection accommodated up to four players.

Release and credits

Wikipedia gives release dates of 14 November 2005 in North America, 17 November in Australia, 25 November in Europe and 8 December in Japan. From 28 November 2005 Nintendo also sold the game with a red Nintendo DS bundle that included a checkered-flag wrist strap and decals. Wikipedia lists the developer as Nintendo EAD and the publisher as Nintendo, and Metacritic prints Nintendo for both roles.

The game came back on the Wii U Virtual Console in North America and PAL regions in April 2015 and in Japan in May 2016.

Reception

Critics gave it what Metacritic calls universal acclaim. Craig Harris of IGN called it the strongest kart racer he had played, and Bryn Williams of GameSpy praised the precision of the controls. The game collected Editors’ Choice Awards from GameSpot and IGN and a Best Handheld Game award at G-Phoria, Wikipedia records.

Complaints were specific. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer and Chris Shepperd of Nintendo Power disliked the rubber-band behaviour that lets trailing racers catch up, and Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com disliked the friend code system used for online matches. Reviewers also noted that the four-player online limit felt thin next to eight-player local races.

In its first week on sale in the United States, 112,000 people bought the game and 52,000 of them connected to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. By March 2016 it had sold 23.6 million copies, making it the third-bestselling DS game after New Super Mario Bros. and Nintendogs.

Can you still play it?

A physical Mario Kart DS cartridge works in the Nintendo DS, DS Lite and DSi, and the Nintendo 3DS family runs it in its DS mode. A Wii U or a Switch will not accept the card. Wikipedia’s region lock article says DS cartridges are not region-locked unless the software is exclusive to the DSi, and this is not such a title, so a European, American or Japanese copy runs on any of these handhelds.

What no longer works is the online half. Nintendo ended the Wi-Fi Connection on 20 May 2014. The Wii U Virtual Console edition could be bought only until the Wii U and 3DS eShop closed worldwide on 27 March 2023, and Nintendo stopped making the 3DS family on 16 September 2020. Used cartridges are the practical route.